THE Canberra Australian Decorative and Fine Arts Society’s Young Arts Award has gone to glassmaker Laura Sandoval.

The amount of $1000 given by ADFAS Canberra is used by the artist to further a project connected to their art practice. As well, the prestige attached to the award has in the past been helpful for a young artist in establishing a career.

A small group of ADFAS Committee members in conjunction with Management at the Canberra Glassworks met in early August to judge the award. The artist chosen this year is Laura

Sandoval has studied industrial design at the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana in Mexico and glass blowing for design and sculpture at the Pilchuck Glass School in the USA and has a Masters degree from the Sydney University College of the Arts, specialising in glass.

“For the last year,” she says, “ I have been working on a series of glass and crystal jewellery inspired by geometrical, symmetric and asymmetric prisms taking prisms as a transparent optical element with flat polished surfaces that refract light.”

The design of her pieces of jewellery has seen her using specialised modelling software to 3D print them and cast prototypes. She will use the award to continue to experiment with this line of production which she plans to begin at the Canberra Glassworks in mid-September.

The second Young Arts Award OF $1000, focusing on art school graduates, went to Isabella Mackay-Sim, who has just graduated from the ANU Canberra School of Art and whose hand built highly glazed ceramics objects  are described as bering “ some resemblance to  plant forms yet their tentacle-like growths also relate them to the animal world.”